Puppet Master vol.1

by Miyuki Miyabe

  　Shigeko smiled tightly. “Well, I had to go out. And our veranda was still wet from last night's rain.”

  　“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Shigeta nodded understandingly. “Did you go out with your hair all mussed up like that? Looks like you've just gotten out of bed. Toodle-oo,” she said, and promptly disappeared back inside.

  　Mussed hair? It did feel a mess when she touched it. Interfering old busybody.

  　The next-door neighbor Mrs. Shigeta was a childhood friend of Shigeko's mother-in-law and they were formidably close. On top of that, she seemed to have found her purpose in life in informing her friend about every little blunder Shigeko made, right down to the very last detail. Shigeko took the garbage out in the middle of the night. Shigeko was still asleep when the deliveryman came and didn't hear the doorbell, so I took it in for her. She never missed a thing, and it was beyond irritating.

  　Last summer, when Shoji Maehata had proposed to her, she had made it a non-negotiable condition of her acceptance that she wouldn't have to leave her job. “That means I won't be able to help with the family business. Plus, I don't want to live with your parents─I wouldn't be able to carry on working if we lived with them. Are you okay with that?”

  　“I don't mind in the least─I want you to do as you please,” he'd said. “I inherited the family business, but that's my thing─you have your own thing, Shige-chan. My brother and his wife don't live with them either. So it's fine, let's do it the way you want.” But he'd also muttered as an afterthought, “Just, when we have kids I'd want you to stop work.”

  　“We'll deal with that when we come to it,” Shigeko had replied.

  　And so she'd believed their marriage should be relatively comfortable─but she shouldn't have counted on that. Her mother-in-law had said she didn't mind if Shigeko didn't help with the family business or if they chose to live on their own, but at the very least she wanted them to live in the same area. “Shoji is an important worker for us, and when we're busy he sometimes has to work the night shift. I want him to live within walking distance. From our place to that publisher where you work, Shigeko─where was it, Ginza or Shinbashi, wasn't it?─it's only about forty minutes so it's doable for you. Don't you agree?”

  　Well, I suppose I can deal with that much, she'd thought, but then her mother-in-law pressed even further. “And if you live near us, then you don't need to be paying rent to anyone else. You can live in one of our condos. We'll make the rent cheap for you. It just so happens that a south-facing third-floor corner apartment is available.

  　In addition to their house and the metal works, the Maehatas had more land where they had built a three-story condo for renting out. The fact that her husband's family had property was not at all a bad thing for Shigeko, but actually living in that condo was another matter. It was bound to mean losing their freedom in all kinds of ways so she'd wanted to resist that move at all costs, and intended to refuse on some pretext or other. But then her own parents, who lived in Saitama, and especially her mother, unexpectedly weighed in with their opinion.

  　“Look, you're marrying into a family that has its own factory, but still you have the luxury of them agreeing to your not helping with the family business. The least you can do is listen to what your mother-in-law is saying.”

  　“Why should I? I'm telling you, I'm not going to work for Maehata Metal Works. I'm only marrying Shoji Maehata.”

  　“That's not how marriage works.”

  　“Mom, whose side are you on?”

  　“Yours, of course. I'm telling you this for your own good, so listen to me. You're the one who's being stubborn and small-minded, and that's what worries me.”

  　Both her mother and her mother-in-law had been born and brought up to be hardworking wives. It was ingrained in them. Even if you tried telling them that the conditions of marriage were by mutual consent between both partners, to them it was just empty talk. To make matters even worse, Shoji, who was supposed to be on her side, started saying things like, “It would be good for me to live near the factory too. And the rent'll be cheap. It's win-win, isn't it, Shige-chan?”

  　With even him laying it on thick like this, everything had been settled without Shigeko ever clearly agreeing to it. Oh well, she'd thought, at least we're not actually living with them. That's something. But then they'd found themselves living next door to that old tattletale Mrs. Shigeta.

  　“She's the GCIA if ever there was one.”

  　“GCIA?”

  　“The Granny Central Intelligence Agency.”

  　“You do say the funniest things sometimes, Shige-chan.”

  　He'd found it so amusing that she'd had the urge to slap him.

  　Then the fact that Shigeko was in no hurry to get pregnant also became a point of contention for her mother-in-law. When the subject of their marriage had first been brought up, she'd had no compunction over declaring, “Thirty-one? She's not going to be much use as a woman at that age.” This had provoked an unusually furious response from Shoji, who to Shigeko's delight had yelled back “My wife is not a machine for producing babies!” But now that they'd settled into married life, it was clear that Shoji did want to have children─if only to keep his mother quiet, which was absurd.

  　She spread some jam on her toast and mechanically stuffed it into her mouth as she read the morning newspaper. Shoji was in the habit of reading the day's papers over an evening drink, and would leave the morning paper untouched, still with the advertising fliers in it, on the kitchen table for her.

  　That was another one: the wife reads the newspaper before the husband. It was a trivial point, but apparently it rubbed her mother-in-law the wrong way. It might have been okay if Shoji hadn't gone and talked about it, but he casually let it drop in conversation at work one day: At home, Shigeko reads the papers first. After all, she does work for the media. “What do you mean, the media?” her mother-in-law had asked right on cue. Shigeko had her own spy, a young woman who kept the factory books, and was so good at mimicking her mother-in-law that Shigeko couldn't help laughing every time she did it.

  　“It's not as if Shigeko writes anything important. She says she does interviews, but they're never with anybody I've ever heard of. Her articles are all things like ‘How to make delicious salads’ that are only read by stupid women who don't even know how to wash rice.”

  　Her mother-in-law's rather snide comment had touched a raw nerve. It wasn't that she thought how to season salads was meaningless, or that her readers were “stupid women” as her mother-in-law had so caustically put it. She had been working for over ten years as a freelancer for women's and home magazines─she couldn't have done that if she didn't have any respect for the people who followed her articles. But now she'd set up home with Shoji, she had begun wondering whether she should continue doing the same work. Her job depended on research, which involved irregular hours, compounded by the fact she was a night owl and wrote her articles at night─and ended up oversleeping in the morning.

  　Shoji accepted this completely: “I knew that from the start,” he always said. But sometimes she couldn't help feeling sorry for him. She couldn't even make breakfast for him, and last winter he'd been shivering in his thin fall jacket well into December because she hadn't gotten around to getting out the warmer clothes. He'd laughed it off, saying it wasn't as if he had far to commute, and since they were his own clothes he could sort them out himself. But this just made her feel guilty, which made her mad. He doesn't have to be so understanding! He should get annoyed sometimes. Why doesn't he ever complain that he didn't get married to live like this?

  　And it had got her wondering. If she couldn't manage her own home properly, what gave her the right to write articles for women's magazines? “Marriage is a contrivance substituting happiness for convenience,” as the saying went, but for Shigeko, marriage was rather a contrivance that imparted a sense of wrongdoing one by one to all the things that she had never felt guilty about when she was sin
gle. Is my job worth doing to the extent of neglecting my husband? Before she knew it her thoughts had vaguely taken this direction.

  　She snorted and slapped her hands down on the newspaper, stood up, and turned the TV on. Instead of worrying, perhaps she should get the laundry going─that would be far more practical. It was the time of day for the TV gossip shows. A reporter, his face tense, was standing in a park against a backdrop of police cars and figures clad in blue coveralls running this way and that. Shigeko had been on her way to the washing machine in the bathroom, but suddenly she stopped. “… the arm is thought to belong to a missing woman currently the subject of a police search request,” informed the reporter. Shigeko's eyes almost popped out of her head. She quickly sat down in front of the TV and turned up the volume.

  　The reporter was hooked up to the studio and answering questions from the woman anchor.

  　“Mr. Saito, other than the arm and the handbag, have there been any other discoveries at Okawa Park?”

  　“So far it appears not.”

  　“Is it certain the handbag and the arm belonged to the same person?”

  　“No, they haven't yet been able to verify that.”

  　“I see. Well, please call in as soon as you have any new information.” The camera cut back to the studio, and a small white subtitle appeared at the bottom right of the screen: Psychopath? Body parts in park. “All told this is a horrifying case. We hope it's resolved quickly. And now, a commercial break.”

  　Shigeko flipped channels looking for some more detailed information. On all the main stations, it was the time slot for chat shows or drama reruns. She clicked through the stations impatiently, but none of them were dealing with the body parts case─even the first show had moved on to a different topic. She clicked her tongue irritably. She thought for a moment, then remembered there was a radio hung on the wall in the bathroom. Shoji liked to listen to the baseball night games while he was having a bath and had bought a waterproof radio for that purpose. She tuned into NHK to hear the announcer say, “So the situation appears to be quite complex, with a lot of activity going on at the scene.”

  　It was the park case! Shigeko put her ear close to the radio.

  　“Yes, indeed. As I said before, it's been confirmed that the shoulder bag that was found belongs to Mariko Furukawa, a twenty-year-old woman who has been missing since June and whose whereabouts are the subject of an ongoing police investigation. However, tests to determine whether or not the arm is Miss Furukawa's are still underway.”

  　Shigeko slapped her forehead with her palm three times. Her mouth, reflected in the bathroom wall mirror, dropped open in surprise. Mariko Furukawa. She's on my list! What the hell? Then she recalled the unfinished manuscript stowed away in a drawer, the one that opened: “Women who disappear. Why do they disappear? Where do they go and what are they looking for? Or is there something else behind their disappearance?”

  　Answers to these questions now seemed to be presenting themselves. “What the hell?” Shigeko said again, this time out loud. Her sleepiness evaporated. A shiver of something like anticipation ran up her spine.

  It had been, what, two and a half years ago─the spring of 1994. It was just around the time that Sabrina had folded, so she remembered it well.

  　Sabrina was a monthly magazine that had been launched in 1985. Initially it had been a concept magazine aimed at single women in their early twenties, covering film, theater, events, books, continuing education, and so forth. It also ran stories on fashion and dining, and had a column on international affairs and environmental issues, as well as a discussion corner featuring women journalists. Even now Shigeko thought its content hadn't been without substance. But the magazine was hurt by the fact that its focus was neither culture nor hard news but somewhere in between, and had stayed in the red from the start. Its plain format, particularly, was nothing like the glossies and was out of sync with the times, given that from the late eighties Japan's economy was entering the bubble period and the whole country was awash in cash and wallowing in luxury.

  　Shigeko's work at Sabrina was the “Traditional Craftsmanship” page, and since she had always been interested in the work of artisans she enjoyed the assignment. It was one of her main sources of income at the time, along with the interview page for a job placement magazine. That page had been titled “Straight Talk” and featured students looking for jobs as well as HR reps from a wide range of companies. Thanks to the bubble economy it was a great success, but in fact they couldn't fully live up to the promise of the title. For Shigeko it was an often-exhausting gig, juggling as it did the extravagant demands of job-seeking students reveling in the seller's market and the duplicitous tactics of the hardnosed corporate types pretending to address them.

  　Sabrina provided a welcome contrast, enveloping her in a kind of soothing warmth. Her work for it brought her into contact with a great number of artisans. Even now she remembered them all: the craftsman who made handmade tubs, the master in the art of sewing kimonos who was training his successor on the job, the traditional picture framer who always took care not to not do anything that would cause problems for the next generation of artisans as he worked─when she listened to them and looked into their eyes, she would think that maybe this was an honest way for people to make a living. She didn't know whether it was right or wrong, a good thing to do or not─but she did believe it was honest. It was while she was doing this work that she had met Shoji and started dating him, and it was probably precisely because of her experience at Sabrina that she had been so unexpectedly strongly attracted to him. Through her work for “Traditional Craftsmanship” she began to develop respect and admiration for the lifestyle of those who toiled over making things with their own hands.

  　As a result, she drew closer to the Sabrina editorial department and often went out drinking with the chief editor, Itagaki. “Traditional Craftsmanship” ran for fourteen straight issues, after which Shigeko became a so-called reserve, sent out here and there to look into the chief editor's pet projects and write articles on them, which was also a lot of fun. And so like a dream the bubble years came to an end and the nation fell into the abyss of recession, in which it found itself stranded on a sea of financial distress. In these new times Sabrina found itself in an ever more precarious situation, a shock that registered for Shigeko as a great irony: the untrendy, modest Sabrina had only ever been kept afloat by the booming economy of the bubble years in the first place.

  　Soon after it was decided to discontinue publication, the chief editor had summoned Shigeko and the two of them had gone out drinking. They found a place open until dawn and had kept on drinking right until closing time. Itagaki, facing unemployment with the closing of the magazine, was thoroughly drunk and told her thickly, “Shige-chan, I want to see you do a job where you're not at everyone's beck and call.”

  　“Not at everyone's beck and call?” Equally drunk, Shigeko was argumentative. “But I'm only fit to be a hired hand. Anything else is too much for a writer like me.”

  　“Yeah, right, a writer …” Itagaki's eyes swam with tears as he stared at the counter, the corners of his mouth quivering with what appeared to be anger. “I'm saying you should write your own stuff. You can do it.”

  　“Like what?”

  　“Try writing a book. Write about something you're interested in. Serious reportage.”

  　“Serious reportage? Ha!” Shigeko roared with laughter. “No way! I'm not capable of anything like that.”

  　“Yes you are. Try it.”

  　They kept up a drunken Yes you are, no I'm not for a while. What followed was lost in an alcohol-induced haze, and Shigeko couldn't precisely remember. But later, after she returned home as the sun came up and slept dead to the world, only managing to crawl out of bed well past noon with the mother of all hangovers, she felt something lodged in her mind.

  　Write your own stuff. But, what can I write about?

  　And so Shigeko ha
d gone back to her life without Sabrina. As the days and nights passed, that little seed was gradually forgotten. For one thing, she didn't have much time to give to anything beyond the struggle to recover from the major loss of income now that Sabrina had folded.

  　About a half-month later, during the long public holiday in May, Shigeko had gone on her first trip with Shoji, driving down to Shimoda in Izu. Their relationship had started around the publication of the third installment in Shigeko's “Traditional Craftsmanship” series, so they had grown quite intimate by now, but this was the first time just the two of them had ever gone away alone together. “You're late bloomers, aren't you!” her friend had teased, not unreasonably.

  　The trip had been a lot of fun. In fact, it had been a lot more enjoyable than Shigeko had imagined. Shoji was an exceedingly careful driver, and everyone overtook them on the expressway. When Shigeko had taken over the driving and half jokingly set off at top speed, he had made her laugh when he'd gone white as a sheet and yelled, “Shige-chan, watch out! Watch out!”

  　Later, after they'd gotten married, he'd confessed to her, “You were a bit depressed after Sabrina went down, weren't you, Shige-chan? I thought a change of scenery might be a good idea.”

  　“You mean you thought it'd be easier to get me to go away with you when I was depressed?”

  　“Bingo.”

  　As it happened, though, Shoji's cheerful nature had lifted her spirits on that trip. By that time, it would have been entirely natural for them to have already been sleeping together, but even in this respect Shoji was cautious. Not even during their three nights in a hotel in Shimoda did he come on to her. He was so funny that he always made Shigeko laugh, and somehow they didn't get in the mood. “When I'm laughing, I just can't …” he told her in all seriousness later. It was true, reflected Shigeko, and that in itself was quite wonderful.

  　Finally they reached the last of four gloriously fun-packed days. Shigeko had begged to go on one last ride on a pleasure boat, and so they'd headed for the boat terminal. Being a major national holiday, the waiting room was packed and noisy, full of families with kids yelling and crying. Shigeko grew tired of this and since there was another twenty minutes to wait for the next boat, she told Shoji she was going out for a cigarette and made her escape. Shoji had never smoked, other than a few times in his student days.